Mentoring Monday — Illinois high school newspaper staff pastes up Senior Edition

Mentee Sue Fuller worked with the newspaper staff at Heritage High School (Broadlands, Ill.) to paste up the Senior Edition of the newspaper. Photo by Carol Smith

Illinois mentor Carol Smith accompanied mentee Sue Fuller and her journalism class to the office of The Villa Grove News, the county newspaper, to prepare the Senior Edition of The Predator, the newspaper of Heritage High School, Broadlands, Ill. 

Here’s Smith’s account:

The staff produces the other issues of the newspaper with Office Publisher and then prints the newspaper by using a copier. The Villa Grove News prints the Senior Edition of the paper, which The Predator staff sells at graduation to earn the $150 printing cost of the newspaper. Heritage High School has 153 students, grades 9-12.

For the senior edition, the staff literally cut and pasted the paper, which was the printing process used before desktop publishing and computerized production. The News editor showed the students a drawer full of various-sized letters and numbers from the old linotype press that they still have.

This should prove that the technology used by mentees’ schools varies greatly.

The newspaper staff pasted up the Senior Edition at the location commercial newspaper and sold the newspapers at graduation. Photo by Carol Smith

This was Fuller’s first year as newspaper adviser. Fuller had helped last year’s adviser take the paper to Villa Grove to publish and print it, so she knew what to expect. She had the students print their stories, pictures, graphs, etc., and laid them on news print at school so they would know what the pages should look like. They made several copies of each article, picture, and some fillers just in case, and cut, waxed, and pasted them once they arrived at the News office.

The students enjoyed the hustle of putting the pages together at the office, and they only had a couple of size issues. They also enjoyed cleaning up white spaces on the negatives and watching the printers make the aluminum sheets and printing the pages.

The News does publish two village papers from pdf files. Next year Fuller should have two licenses for InDesign. She plans to learn how to use the program this summer. Maybe the students can still cut and paste one page just for the experience.

Editor’s note: Mentoring Monday is a feature on the JEA Mentoring blog. We’d like to feature photos of short stories about the JEA mentors, their mentees and the high school journalism students. Please send your photo, caption and story to 2jdodd (at) gmail (dot) com.